What Would You Do With $2 Million a Month?

A fun thought experiment.

Sometimes I think about how much money it would take for the low levels of generalized financial anxiety I have to disappear completely. Maybe it’s $10,000 a month. Maybe it’s $3,000 every other week. Honestly, the answer is probably how much I have now and not a penny more because despite what I think about my money and my financial security, I’m doing just fine. My lifestyle rests somewhere between austere and an episode of My Super Sweet 16 and for that I am grateful. That’s just how I like it.

Still, it’s fun to entertain thoughts about what to do with way more money than one human being should have in a month. Would I finally buy the things I haven’t bought on Amazon? Would I pay off all of my debt in one day? Would I donate most of it to charity? I can say with confidence that my answer to those hypotheticals is a resounding yes. However, if I was famous person Johnny Depp, my answer would be, uh, quite different.

Johnny Depp Hit With Countersuit by Ex-Business Managers

It seems that Johnny Depp is suing his former business managers for mismanaging his money and they’ve slapped him with a countersuit explaining quite clearly that it wasn’t their fault, it was Johnny’s because he spends close to $2 million a month on the kind of stuff you imagine a famous person spends their money on when they get famous.

Here’s a small sampling from the countersuit:

• $75 million on 14 residences that include a chateau in the South of France, a chain of islands in the Bahamas, and a horse farm in Kentucky.
• $18 million on a 150 foot yacht.
• $30,000 per month on what sounds like his own personal Wine of the Month club, except said wines were flown to him “around the world for his personal consumption.”
• Art, “world class jewelry,” “70 collectible guitars,” and a massive collection of Hollywood memorabilia and collectibles.

He also spent $3 million on a special cannon that shot Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes out over Aspen, Colorado, but I’m pretty sure that was a one time thing.

The thought of having $2 million a month is too much to comprehend. Divided by thirty days, that works out to be about $66,666 a day. That’s a private college tuition. That’s a car? That’s a house somewhere. Think hard. How could you spend this much money in a day? Is there enough stuff to buy? Are there enough things to eat? Would you stuff a mattress with it just to say that you’re literally sleeping on $50 bills, because you can?

When I asked the staff of the Hairpin and the Awl what they would do with that sort of cash in an attempt to corral answers for this post, everyone came up with answers ranging from flying first class to living in a hotel to saving half and then going nuts with the rest. No one had a real answer because that amount of money is so abstract and so unrealistic for a regular old person that we haven’t even had the chance to contemplate it.

What’s tricky with this imagined scenario is that the money isn’t a windfall. It’s much easier to think about what you’d do with a lump sum, because you get it, you allocate it, you spend it, then it’s gone.

What Would You Do With a $20,000 Windfall?

$2 million is cartoon money. It’s not real. It’s not something we will ever be able to get our hands on. I’m struggling to think of what I would do with this amount of cash and the only real answer I can come up with is “Pay off all my debt and my parent’s debt, buy myself a perfume I really like and donate the rest.” I’d also probably ask that the person providing me with this money to kindly stop after the first month.

Say a genie or a crazy rich person with money to burn bestows you with this dubious honor. What do you do?

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